About Social Intel API

What it does

Social Intel API lets you search Instagram profiles by niche, location, follower range, and engagement metrics — and get back structured data including audience demographics, engagement rates, and contact emails.

Every request costs $0.10 USD, paid in USDC on the Base blockchain using the x402 payment protocol. There are no API keys, no accounts, no subscriptions. You send a request, attach a payment, and get data.

The API is designed for marketing agencies building influencer workflows, indie developers creating outreach tools, and AI agents that need to autonomously discover and evaluate Instagram creators.

Why it was built

Influencer discovery is a $25B+ market still dominated by manual searches and bloated SaaS tools charging $300+/month. Most teams either overpay for features they don't use, or build brittle scrapers that break every few weeks.

The alternative was obvious: a simple API, pay only for what you use, no account required. The harder problem was how to collect payment without building an auth system, billing infrastructure, and API key management.

x402 solved that. HTTP 402 ("Payment Required") lets a server declare a price and payment address in the response header. The client pays directly to a wallet on-chain, includes the transaction hash, and retries. No middleware, no subscriptions, no friction.

The result is an API that an AI agent can call without any human setup — no keys to provision, no billing to configure, no terms to accept. The agent just pays.

Technology stack

Who it's for

Social Intel API was designed with three primary use cases in mind:

Marketing agencies and freelancers running influencer campaigns. Instead of paying $300+/month for a platform you use twice a week, call the API when you need it and pay only for the searches you run. You get structured JSON back — email addresses, follower counts, engagement rates, audience demographics — ready to import into your CRM or outreach tool.

Developers building influencer tooling. If you're building an outreach platform, a campaign dashboard, or a lead generation tool for clients, you need a programmatic data source with predictable costs. Social Intel API gives you a clean REST endpoint with no rate-limit negotiations, no per-seat pricing, no approval process. You ship your product and pass through the cost.

AI agents that need to autonomously discover creators. The x402 payment protocol was designed specifically so that software can pay for services without human intervention. An AI agent with a USDC wallet can call Social Intel API, pay the $0.10 fee on-chain, and receive influencer data — without any human setting up keys, configuring billing, or approving transactions. This is the core reason the API was built the way it was.

What data is returned

Each search result includes the Instagram profile's username, follower count, following count, biography text, profile category, and whether the account is verified or a business account. Business accounts additionally surface contact emails — the highest-value field for outreach workflows.

Audience data includes estimated age distribution, gender split, top cities, and country breakdown where available. Engagement rate is calculated from recent posts. You can filter searches by keyword, location, minimum follower count, gender, age range, and account type (personal, business, or creator).

Results are sorted by follower count descending. The API returns up to 100 results per request. For most searches, 20 results is sufficient — the base price covers up to 20 results at $0.10, with additional results costing $0.002 each beyond that.

How x402 payments work

The x402 protocol is an open standard for HTTP-native micropayments. When you send a request to Social Intel API without payment, the server responds with HTTP 402 and a X-Payment-Required header describing the price, accepted tokens, and the receiving wallet address.

Your client (or an x402-compatible library) reads that header, constructs a USDC transfer on Base or Solana, broadcasts it to the network, and re-sends the original request with the X-Payment header containing the signed payment proof. The API verifies the on-chain transaction and returns results.

The entire flow happens in two HTTP requests. There is no session, no token, no webhook, and no reconciliation step. Payment verification is deterministic: if the transaction is valid and the amount matches, the request is served. The facilitator contract — operated by x402.org — handles the on-chain verification so the API server doesn't need to run a blockchain node.

This architecture means the API has zero authentication surface area. There are no API keys to leak, no accounts to compromise, and no billing system to breach.

Privacy & data handling

Social Intel API does not collect or store any information about callers. Because payment happens via blockchain transfer directly to a seller wallet, we never receive your email address, IP address in a persistent log, or any identifying information. The on-chain transaction is public, but it contains only token amounts and wallet addresses — no metadata linking it to your query.

Search queries are not logged beyond the immediate request lifecycle. We maintain aggregate counters (total requests, revenue) for operational monitoring but do not retain per-query logs or associate query content with wallet addresses.

The Instagram profile data returned by the API is sourced from public profile information. We do not scrape private content, access DMs, or process data from non-public accounts. Contact emails are only returned for accounts that have publicly listed them in their business profile settings.

If you have privacy or data concerns, contact us at [email protected].

Open source MCP server

The Model Context Protocol server for Social Intel API is open source and available on GitHub. MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows AI assistants like Claude to discover and call external tools natively — without custom integrations or prompt engineering.

When you add the Social Intel MCP server to your AI assistant, it appears as a tool called search_leads. You can ask the assistant to "find fitness influencers in Los Angeles with over 10,000 followers" and it will construct and execute the API call, handle the x402 payment, and present you with structured results — all in one conversational turn.

The MCP server is listed on Smithery and Glama. You can install it with a single command using any MCP-compatible client.

Contact & support